Sarah Moon: Circus

Sarah Moon’s Circus brings together the powerful ingredients of fairytale darkness, beauty and tragedy. This will be the first time Circus has been exhibited in the United Kingdom and is Moon’s second exhibition at Michael Hoppen Gallery. The exhibition consists of 35 silver gelatin prints executed on the set of Moon’s recent film Circus, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl. 

Circus follows multiple narratives of circus performers: acrobats, giraffes, fire-eaters, elephants, a worried clown and a stoic marabou stork. The circus is disbanded when Nastassia, the tightrope walker, trapeze artist and the knife throwers target, runs away mid-performance. She leaves to join her lover, abandoning the circus and her daughter Jane. Some of the performers carry on the charade of a circus whilst others walk away. Some of the animals simply die without the circus and little Jane runs away to the city to sell her matches. Alone, cold and ignored in a winter city, Jane strikes her matches one by one to conjure up fantastical images of her friends in the circus until all the matches are gone. She is found in the morning, dead in the snow. (continued on second floor gallery...)